Be patient, as things will be busy initially. If you have trouble downloading then please try a bit later. if you’re still stuck, email us at medwayeyes@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to get back to you within a day or two.

The weekend of the 29th and 30th November promises to be a good one. The ME5 album (our fifth annual download compilation of Medway music) is in the can and ready for digital release at midnight on Friday 29th November, all 58 tracks of it, and the Just Giving page for donations to Young Minds is under construction. For reasons we’ll come to in a minute, we thought a five year run was worth celebrating with a more than one event, so think of the weekend as a mini-festival.

On Friday 29th November you will have two choices: You can come to the Nag’s Head in Rochester to see Broken Banjo, The Flying Isaacs and The Flowing, or you can go to St Mary’s Social Club in Gillingham to hear acoustic sets by Theatre Royal and Wildfowl plus some open mic performances.

On Saturday 30th we’ll be at the Barge in Gillingham for performances by Balance Lost, Natalie Evans and Chris ‘Arfur’ Allen for a gig that will serve not only as an after launch party for the ME5 album, but also as a ‘goodnight and thank you’ from Medway Eyes. Not only will ME5 be the last album we put out, this will also be the last ever Medway Eyes event. We’ve achieved a lot along the way, but five years is a long enough run for a good idea and it’s time to pursue other things.

A group of promoters comprised of BeeDee Productions, Medway Eyes, Motherboy, Suburban Kings and TEA have been looking at the possibility of putting on a fringe festival of Medway music in 2013, structured such that it doesn’t necessarily revolve around a single main event and can be co-operatively run.

To that end, we (the five promoters named above – let’s call it ‘the umbrella group’ for now) have agreed in principle to stage a fringe festival on (and hopefully around) Saturday 13th July 2013, led by independent artists and promoters. We’ll be putting our heads together shortly to give it a name and an identity, and to clarify our vision and the way in which we will engage with artists, venues and technicians. We’ll be talking to some of those people to help us define a way of operating that everyone involved can understand, agree on and feel comfortable with. Once we’ve established all of that, we’ll set up a web presence so that anyone wishing to participate and help us to broaden activities can get in touch. Crucially, any person or entity wishing to participate, however big or small, will understand and engage with the vision.

Medway Council is reported to be planning to organise or enable a music festival in Medway in 2013, and there has been much discussion about this in the social media. We are open minded as to if and how our festival might potentially become linked with other concurrent events and activites, or whether it could have council involvement or support. Ultimately our festival will be able to exist independently and remain under our control.

The focal point would be the music/gig element, taking place in a series of venues on a single day (possibly two days).

It will not be organised and managed on a top-down basis, but will emerge from a variety of people and organisations working together, creating and managing their own events. However, the umbrella group will;

– agree on a festival name, identity, operating principles and design of promotional materials,
– coordinate effort (e.g. so we’re not trying to book the same bands),
– communicate with external entities as a single voice.

The concept is to build this from the bottom up. We start with the easy bit, booking a handful of pubs and venues for the day. We are thinking early afternoon starts. This is the core, the very least that will happen. Then we can build it up from there. For example; warm-up or come-down gigs could feature on the days before or after the main event. Non-music art events could take place through out the week and on the day.

We’ll keep you posted. You can subscribe to this blog or follow Medway Eyes on Facebook or Twitter for now . We’re not leading the umbrella group, it’s just that someone had to make the first post so we volunteered.

We’re very pleased to announce that Medway Eyes has been shortlisted for the Music Award at the Medway Culture and Design Awards 2012. A huge thank you to those who nominated us, and of course to all the bands, musicians, venues, sound engineers, photographers, writers, radio hosts and wonderful bar staff who have helped us to shine a light on the immense wealth of grass roots talent we have here in Medway. An award for Medway Eyes would be an award for everyone, so wish us luck on the night. Intriguingly, the full shortlist won’t be published in advance of the Awards Ceremony, so we can only guess who we’re up against.

The Awards ceremony takes place on Thursday 6th December. We’ll let you know how we get on.

We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate our friends at WOW Medway on their richly deserved nomination for the Media Award. Well done, chaps :0)

Tune in to Fizzer’s Radio Show online tomorrow night (Monday 1st October) from 8pm to 10pm to hear our spokesperson Phil promoting ME4, this year’s Medway Eyes charity compilation, with a special guest and a clutch of interesting mp3s on a tiny stick thing. Find out who’s launching this year’s album for us and learn about our chosen charity in advance of the full press release malarkey on October 7th.